Pool Tragedy Blamed On City

June 11, 1985|By Howard Witt.

A green plastic bucket floated eerily in the murky water of the Fisher Park swimming pool in Gary on Monday. Four pairs of children`s shoes were lined up near the water`s edge. Several frogs hopped between the empty medical boxes left behind by paramedics.

To any who would look, these few items told a shorthand version of the tragic story of five youngsters who drowned in the partly filled pool Sunday evening. The children, ranging in age from 6 to 13, had clambered over the barbed-wire-topped fence around the pool in search of frogs.

One after another, authorities speculate, the children slipped on the slimy bottom of the pool into 6 feet of brackish water that was to have been cleaned out next week in preparation for the pool`s seasonal opening.

Monday morning, the finger-pointing began.

Neighbors gathered around the perimeter of the pool blamed city officials for failing to secure it properly against curious children and vandals.

The Lake County, Ind., coroner blamed the park district for allowing the stagnant water to remain in the deep end of the pool, where the slime it formed on the steeply slanted bottom virtually guaranteed that no person who slipped in would be able to climb out.

A Gary City Council member blamed Mayor Richard Hatcher for being more concerned with his national image than with local problems.

But largely lost amid the hysteria that seemed to grow as more TV cameras arrived was a fundamental question: How much protection is enough?

By all accounts, the five children were determined to enter the pool despite the warnings of a parent and a neighborhood youth. The children, related as cousins, were identified as Edwin Thigpen Jr., 10, and his sister, London, 6; Ossie Britton, 12, and her sister, Linda, 13; and Jacqueline Sharp, 8. The Britton and Thigpen homes are within a few blocks of the pool, and the Sharp girl, from Momence, Ill., was staying with the Brittons.

``I saw them climb the fence,`` recalled Ricky McCord, 15, who lives across the street and who alerted authorities shortly after 6 p.m. Sunday. ``I called out to them to get out of the pool. They just looked at me and finished climbing in.``

Said Oleevy Britton, mother of two of the children: ``I always told them, don`t go near the water. They asked me if they could go to the park. I didn`t know they were talking about going into the pool.``

Exactly how all the children ended up in the water is not known, because neighbors could not see into the 12-foot-deep section of the pool where they drowned. But authorities speculated that at least one of the children entered the deep end of the pool, where the stagnant water had collected, to catch frogs. When that child slipped underwater, the others followed in an attempt to help.

``You couldn`t get out of that water without a rope on you,`` McCord said, recalling how the first police officer on the scene had neighborhood teenagers hold onto a rope tied around his waist as he slid into the water to retrieve the children. The effort took more than 30 minutes, McCord said, and the children died despite paramedics` efforts to resuscitate them.

On the fence around the pool Monday, someone had posted a hand-lettered sign reading ``Fischer Park grave yard,`` a reference to Sunday night`s deaths and the drownings of two other children at the pool in 1978 in a similar incident.

Some of the 50 neighbors gathered to express their anger blamed the park district for opening the pool only intermittently in recent years and failing to repair floodlights damaged by vandals several years ago.

``We`ve been complaining about this pool for years,`` said Bobbi Olah, a resident of the integrated neighborhood of well-kept, single-family homes on the city`s southwest side. ``At night you can`t see in there because there`s no lights. You can hear kids splashing around, but you can`t see them.``

Others blamed Gary police for failing to answer complaints about loitering and vandalism around the pool, one of seven operated by the park district that are scheduled to open June 24.